Score! Brewery Mod..

Went to the dump the other day and found a set of kegs off to the side, that apparently had been owned by a homebrewer before me, because they had the tops cut out already and one of them even had a ball valve and, get this, a stainless steel false bottom installed in it. What the! I grabbed that thing in about 3 seconds flat and it was in my car, paid for, and we were out of there in no time. When I got home, this is what I had:

Bargain!

After that, it was a matter of taking apart my existing mash/lauter tun and reconfiguring mine to essentially be just like this one, but with this SS false bottom installed in my kettle. Why not just use this kettle? This one has a weldless ball valve installed and it was a 3/8ths size, whereas I use 1/2 stuff throughout. The conversion was easy enough though.. here's a pictorial of the conversion:

Parts needed. Total $2.45

Gut the old setup..

Dip tube construction..

Add a collar to stop the false bottom from floating up.. 

Stopper demonstrated

Finished install!

Now, I just need to brew with the thing.. direct fire RIMS system achieved!

NYC, sneak attack & fryathon..

So, me and the Boss headed off to NYC for a concert. Went out to see Chromeo at Terminal 5. Heck of a show, and had a great time there. This is the only decent pic I got of them, as the light show was driving the camera nuts, making it had to get a shot.. most came out black.

We also visited the USS Intrepid while there, and saw a few neat things.

This is gonna be the new controller for my automated brewery..

And this is the new kettle setup for the 40 gallon brewery.

We also hit up Grumpy's coffee and some blah place called Starbucks while walking around the next morning (we stayed the overnight at Ink48 again.. nice place!). Right after we left this Brooklyn Industries store is when we found the parking ticket on our window. Drats.. 

After we got home, we decided to celebrate with a massive fried food extravaganza with my new deep frier.. we had all sorts of things, like this bunch of onion rings, fried Hot Cherry Popper poppers and some fried dough. The poppers made me pay for everything I took from them them the next morning.

And lastly, Barbie the dog was brutally attacked and beaten up by this baby over the weekend as well. I was rooting for the baby..

Monday rolled around soon enough and Geoff and Mike came over to brew. We worked up a sweet pale ale (shocking!) after a few hours and we hope to have that on top here in the next few weeks or so. Stay tuned for that.. 

Amaryllis and eHLT..

The Amaryllis is coming along pretty well.. on the verge of popping out and actually looking like a flower any day now. Check it out:

It's about 2' tall now..

Otherwise, here's some pics of the grounding ring idea I came up with, with a bit of help from my engineering team ;), to ground the electric element to the keg and thus the ground. Also, a pic or two of the JB Weld attachment of the electrical extension box to the side of the keg. This stuff is *way* stronger than I had any idea it would be. To take this off now would require a hammer and some finish work with a grinder to get the JB Weld off. It's serious stuff!

Simple. A metal flat plate with a big hole in it for the element to pass through and ground on.. 

Assembled.. 

And bottom view, with gasket on there.. 

I put a bit of JB Weld on the outside of the box, but..

..most of it is on the inside. 

Next, I did a little electrical work on the inside of the box, including fabricating up all the wires and jumpers and putting the box all together. Check out the mostly finished project:

Not so complicated after all.. 

All buttoned up. ON is UP!

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Haven't run a powered on test yet, because I discovered a small leak around the gasket yesterday when I filled it up with water.. seems there's some seepage around the main gasket that wasn't there before I installed the grounding ring thing. I may have to rethink that a bit.. I'll report back with a solution later.

Big Brew at Don's Dad's house...

Just wanted to share a few pics of the Big Brew we had at Don's Dad's place, sponsored of course, by Don's Dad & Mom as well as Don himself. Great time was had by all. This event also marked the debut of two brand spankin' new brewing rigs, Don and Geoff's metallic monster and Jeremiah's half electric, half propane Frankenbrewery. Here's a few pics of the event and attendees to document the fact that the damn thing happened on Saturday, November 6th, 2010...

Jeremiah with his newest brewery creation.. eHLT!

Timmay and Eric, spargin'.. 

Geoff and Don's new single spine gravity tree..

Launch controler..

Mike Hill, doing something mysterious..

Will and Alex, goofing around.

Jody, rockin' the Top Tier. Classy..

The fruits of Jer's and my brew day.. 5 gallons each of Am. Amber. The newest revision..

Jer took home all of the brewer spent grain that day to feed to some local cows. Damn, we're green!

So, yeah. Resounding success. And I think we may have even inspired some other non-brewers to maybe look into the process. Seems everyone had a pretty good time..

Wicked HLT graphs!

Did something funny today and jury-rigged up my HLT.. no switch, no safety covers, just plugged it straight into the wall and let it rip. Talk about yer' reckless!

Did this with a mostly typical strike water sized volume of water.. 10 gallons. Actually, most strike water volumes for the beers I brew are more like 8.0 to 9.5 gallons for the initial batch of strike water.. and somewhere generally in that same ballpark for the sparge water after the mash. But I figured, let's go large, right? So, I filled it up with cold water from the outdoor faucet which leveled out at 10 gallons of 58 degree water. Then, I plugged in the element and started writing down numbers and times.. I started out doing 2 minute intervals, but I got bored of that pretty quick, and moved to three minutes.. then I missed one along the way and moved to four minutes. It seemed to be doing a pretty straight temp rise anyway, based on the rough numbers in my head that I was seeing, so, whatever.. I then whipped out a handy online graphing program and plotted the 21 data points I gathered and.. lo and behold! This is what I got:

Damn straight, that's a pretty straight line. What the chart is failing to show, for some reason, is the last two points on either end. It ended up boiling at the 74 minute mark, and that's off the chart up there. The main thing to look at, however, is that I never heat stone cold water. I always heat water from the hot water tap that comes out at like, 160 degrees or so.. by the time I get it into the cold HLT and all filled up, it settles in at around the 140 F range, and we heat from there. I can't recall ever measuring exactly how long it takes propane to heat water from 140 to a typical strike water temp like 162 or so, but I'd guess somewhere in the 25-40 minute range. We're usually milling grain and shooting the bull and drinking coffee at this stage of the game anyway, so it doesn't matter much.. but according to this chart, this element will heat from about 140 to around 162 in roughly 10-12 minutes. It's about a 10 degree rise in temp every 4 minutes or so, give or take.

Oh, snap! That's fast. And this is with a 3500w element. You can imagine how quick Jeremiah's is with a 5500w element. That thing is a monster. I think 3500 is enough for me, though. :)

Brewery mods for electricity..

Just got back from the welder shop where I picked up my newly modified kettle that now has the big stainless steel nut welded into the side for the electric element to attach on to. Check the pics for some detail.

Interior view of the element coming into the keg..

Nice welding job, done by Accurate Welding of Barkhamsted. 

The next step is to gather up the appropriate parts to make the connections from the 220v wall outlet to the element, which includes the switch, the box to hold all the parts, the wire holder thingy, and the plug itself. I've already got 16 feet or so of 14 gauge three strand wire, so it's just the little pieces I've got to gather up now. I think a trip down to Lowes should pretty much do the trick. I've been talking to my electrician friend Dave E. and my other ingenious pal Jeremiah to work out the details of all these connections and how to make it safe and workable, and I think I have a plan in mind. Stay tuned for that..

Jeremiah's brewery.. sick!

Better be sitting down, cause this one is a bit weird. Check this out.. hybrid electric propane brewery with a CRANK UP, ADJUSTABLE HEIGHT BOIL KETTLE! What the!

Here's an overview of the thing.. note how low it is to the ground. He did it like this because his ceiling height is lower than my garage is, for example.. so, he made the boil kettle sit low to the ground while boiling, and then adjustable height (it cranks up) simply to drain it with gravity! Wacky..

Here's a shot of the crazy hand made strap crank he configured. It rolls up the side bars with the vertical bars as locator's and skateboard wheels to slide it up the pipes. Bizarre!:

Here's the thing in the low, boiling position:

Then turn the crank and it's up in the air to gravity feed into a carboy..

Out of control! Then, there's the totally awesome upside down dead center drain ports, to say the least of awesome-ness. This this is definitely unique.

The false bottom is a perforated folding setup in the mash-tun. Other than the really trick bottom drained sight glass in the HLT, it's also got a 5500watt powered electric element. This thing.. I swear, you can't make this up.. if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd say it wasn't possible, but we put in 8.6 gallons of 76 degree water in the tun and ramped it to 100 deg in 4min 45sec.. then 130 deg in 9min 50sec, and got it up to strike water temp of 160 deg in only 15min 39seconds. Unreal! Electric is totally mind boggling. The power of these elements over propane is numbing. Check this vid of the HLT boiling water by itself on the concrete floor:

Sorta speaks for itself, but this boil was way too hardcore. We need to bring this way down to use in a boil kettle.. I'm thinking 1500 to 2000 watts to keep a mild simmer.. 5500 was raging.  All inspiring stuff, at least. There's just really something awesome about plugging in a plug and then simply flipping a switch to have enormous power in your kettle. It really made propane look like a joke.. seriously, a kids toy in comparison. I'm a believer.

In any case, he brought this stuff over and we whipped up a Belgian style Dubbel on bits and pieces of both of our systems put together. It came out great and we hit the numbers on it. Stay tuned in a couple weeks for the results of that one.

Dorsky Museum and The Gilded Otter

This is a little out of date, cause this was a week and change ago.. but I went to the Dorsky Museum with the Boss for an opening she had/has going out there. The Ladies Auxiliary was actually the thing, not just the Boss. They seem to be popping up everywhere these days..

Here's a partial shot of the install.. there was more to it than just this, so you'll have to make the trip to see the rest. That child is not included, however. Hi Oscar!

These guys are so hard core, they even have their own T-shirts. More than I can say for my *own* club..

While we were out there, I hit up the Gilded Otter brewpub located a few blocks away in the center of town. Check out this doorman.. excellent job, friend!

Their menu (the one that counted..) was as follows:

I had the sampler, and I'l give props to the Altbier, the Oatmeal Stout and the Rail Trail Pale ale.. but when your Pale Ale out-guns the hops in your IPA, you've gotta reformulate that thing. The IPA, I mean! The altbier was a GABF medal winner, so I expected good things from that, and it didn't disappoint. The Stout wasn't a standout, but the rest I wasn't that thrilled with. I actually took vast notes on all of them, but my iPod seems to have eaten them. Damn. 

They had a curious brewery setup.. here's the brewery itself..

The brewery itself wasn't curious.. except for the Elmo doll seen in the lower left corner of this pic. But the serving setup was kinda strange. They took about 4 jacketed serving tanks and had them plunked down in the center of the big room, taking up prime seating real estate from the restaurant. There were four more chunked down just as you walked in, as well.. also taking up big floor space. The brewery was on the far back wall, behind the regular walkup bar. I imagine that might be a pain to brew on.. but the machinery itself was really sweet. Standard looking 7 or 10 barrel setup, but included an HLT that was separate from the rest. The little guy on the right side of this pic. Interesting. Upstairs, there was a whole lot more fermenters behind double walled glass, in what I imagine was a lagering area.. but they were also lagering in the jacketed tanks downstairs too, so.. I dunno. Curious, like I said. 

'tis all for now.. carry on.